The Genius of Democracy. Victoria Olwell
the many now established facts about the physiological differences in the nervous system of the sexes.” Women’s supposed lack of genius was considered not only a clear marker of their unbridgeable difference from men but also a deficit that specifically proved their incapacity for public life, because it expressed a more general inability to be representative thinkers, innovators, or beings capable of originating new thoughts that could invigorate the polis.
To be sure, the gendering of genius in this tradition is complex. Although some of the same distinctions between men’s and women’s minds were repeated over centuries, these distinctions were grounded in a succession of historical models of the mind that were very different in their basis, and also in models of gender that changed through time. The significance of these shifts forms the subjects of the chapters that follow. It was also the case that discourses of genius sometimes provided room for disarticulating gender from the body.32 The contortions of this tradition are fully evident, for instance, in the Goncourt brothers’ self-consciously elliptical and oft-quoted phrase “There are no women of genius; women of genius are all men.”33 Without a doubt, the “men of genius” often presented their own category deviations; their supposed intuition, instinctiveness, spontaneity, and even physical delicacy associated them with stereotypical femininity.34 As one commentator summarized this problem, “It would seem, then, that genius must possess the emotional qualities that are the natural endowment of woman; while woman herself is excluded from genius.”35 At the same time, though, scholars of this tradition have not failed to note that the gender ambiguity of the genius trope in aesthetic and scientific discourses is wrapped in the certainty of the ultimate “masculinity” of genius, whether or not it is attached to something that is legible as a male body (though it almost always is). My examples fully suggest that as familiar and long-lived as the assertion of the masculinity of genius was, there was also apparently an imperative to repeat it over and over again, across paradigms of knowledge, as the decades passed.
But, this kind of repetition was necessary only because genius was a controversial rather than an uncontested index of sexual difference or gendered being. Although prestigious aesthetic philosophers and scientists claimed that women of genius were, as Meltzer notes, “unimaginable,” the textual archives of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States show that they were imagined all the time, often in moments of contention over the being of “women” and their place in public. When we broaden our archive beyond the works of a handful of Euro-American philosophers and scientists—that is, if we do not by default give priority to the thinkers who already have prestige—we can discern a wide-ranging set of contests over gender and democracy waged in the idiom of genius. When we do so, we can immediately see that feminists and their allies always disputed the claim that women were incapable of possessing the capacity for genius. They sometimes suspected that there was something absurd in having to do so in order to sue for full civic inclusion. As one advocate for women’s rights asked in the New York Times in 1915, “Has anyone proposed to make inventive genius a test of citizenship?”36 Speaking literally, the answer to her rhetorical question was, of course, “no,” but her reductio ad absurdum logic points to the fact that in a well-understood figurative sense, the answer was “yes.”
Genius figured in debates over what women were, what they could do, and how their capacities mattered for their legal and social status. By stepping outside of the narrow philosophical archive of genius and into what turns out to be a broad conversation conducted across different strata of culture and across diverse public spheres, we can see that genius was less a fetish performing the work of ideologically driven concealment and more the field on which competing visions of sexual difference and social organization were staged, and on which feminist critical leverage was often gained. Unfolding these intricate contests will be the work of this book, but it is necessary to say at the outset that they were motivated by the striking fit between models of genius and women’s particular forms of exclusion from state membership and national culture membership.
Looking closely at the historical and theoretical conditions of women’s exclusion that made conceptions of genius so central to debates about gender and citizenship, one of the primary problems we find is this: as feminist political theory has so richly established, the standard of equal citizenship is framed as a universal standard but is nevertheless built on a particular kind of subjecthood, that of white bourgeois manhood. The universal subject, in other words, is a particular subject. The ideal of universal equality on which liberal democracy is based is thus a condition of limited equality and enfranchisement. This is a contradiction that feminist scholars have described in both historical and theoretical terms. The historical roots of the particular content of the universal subject lie in the Euro-American political revolutions of the eighteenth century, which did away with the ancient regime’s basis of power in rank and replaced it with a “natural” and “universal” equality among citizens who create a political order by mutual consent. This universal subject, however, was defined by very particular conditions.37 In the first instance, it was defined through property ownership, a condition that excluded dependents—white women, wage laborers, children, and with brutal completeness, slaves—and put citizenship within reach only of white men of means and standing.
As property lost salience as a norm of citizenship in the early nineteenth-century United States, constructions of essential difference took over the work of justifying the exclusion of most of these groups. Only white wage laborers were largely exempt from this process and assimilated to new norms of citizenship based in reason, taxpaying, and military service.38 By contrast, slaves were increasingly racialized, children were rendered as essentially distinct in kind rather than degree from adults in emerging theories of child rearing and pedagogy, and women were retheorized as men’s ontologically complementary but subordinate opposites. These processes were unequal in their effects; children often benefited greatly from emerging standards of nurture and the relief from labor that followed from their new status as essentially distinct beings, while the naturalization of slavery as race deepened the oppression of enslaved men and women and imperiled at every moment the civic inclusion and protection of even free blacks in the North.39
Across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the peculiar form of white women’s newly posited “essential difference” produced their peculiarly incoherent relation to citizenship. Women’s rights advocates from the mid-nineteenth century on argued for admission to full state citizenship on the theoretical basis on which white men ostensibly enjoyed it—that is, on abstract universal equality. By this point, however, they were fighting a losing battle with newly consolidated models of womanhood marked by characteristics in harmony with women’s ideal cultural location under separate spheres ideology and associated with motherhood, characteristics that carried value in the culture, such as moral superiority, delicacy, and a maternal orientation toward care. In response, women’s rights advocates in the late nineteenth century began to add to the rhetoric of equality that had defined the mid-century efforts of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony another and seemingly contradictory set of arguments based on notions of women’s special nature.40 This was a profoundly class- and race-based construction of the category of “woman” shaped by white, bourgeois ideals attainable by few and strictly lived by even fewer. Yet given the power of this class, it is no surprise that it functioned as the universal construct of femininity for many debates about suffrage and women’s rights more broadly.
These formations of domestic femininity had enormous cultural power that gave them a certain pragmatic and often sentimental appeal, in keeping with the typically sentimental content of bourgeois constructions of women’s being and difference. They were essentially conservative in terms of gender ideology. When turn-of-the-century antisuffragists argued that women should be barred from the vote because their nature suited them to nurture children and exert moral influence, suffragists countered by essentially repeating antisuffragist claims about women’s nature while insisting that this nature fitted women for citizenship. Women would use their ability to nurture to help clean up the streets, make sure that food was distributed to needy children, and advocate for better education; their moral superiority would elevate a franchise corrupted by machine politics and the instrumentalities of capitalism. Women’s particularity would define their contributions to civic and public life. As the historian